Dan
What a versatile writer Benjamin Myers is, from The Golden Perfect Circle to Cuddy to Rare Singles to this. These could be the works of four different writers, so perhaps it is appropriate that this latest work brings this literary ventriloquism to the surface, Myers inhabits Kinski, in an astonishing feat of impersonation. It’s superbly written and convincing from start to finish. The other half of this novella is the author presenting himself as a character, and it’s a pleasant enough read, but it’s hard to shake off the vibe of Mike Yarwood (there’s a reference for the kids) doing his “and this is me” bit at the end of the show. Overall, I think this is a curio in a great career. It’s technically excellent, but ultimately rather slight.
This is a big collection, thirty plus stories. It works well as an overview of Powell’s career so far. His Embers of war and Ack Ack Macaque series are both represented, one in a story which was the germ of things to come and the other by a pair of stories written after (during?) the main series and illuminating it in a different way. His familiar themes and obsessions are here, made more obvious by having them reflected thirty two different ways. In many ways it feels like a summing up of the first phase of his career, and it’d be nice to think that it’s both a capstone to that and a foundation for what is to come
Very happy to have Jack Parlabane back, and more so that this is a return to the exuberant and over the top style of books like Be My Enemy and …Rubber Ducks after the more understated recent entries in the series. There are strong Succession vibes as the Maskyn family (and boy is there a lot of masking going on in this book) struggle with the future direction of their family business, on a sea cruise that becomes a microcosm of the ongoing culture war. Set in our world of divisive politics and online opinions. It’s no surprise where Brookmyre’s and Parlabane’s allegiances lie, but he is a smart enough writer to avoid the easy right wing = bad, left wing = good trap, and you will find your take on characters on each side of the divide changing as the story progresses.
Basically, I loved this. It’s twisty, turny, funny, dramatic, compassionate and exciting, as good as any previous Parlabane adventure. I did worry that the title, referencing as it did the very first Jack Parlabane novel, was an indication that this could be the end of the series, a capstone to the whole lot. It may yet be, of course, but there’s no air of finality, and the ending leaves a whole new direction Jack could go in, should the author choose. I’ll keep reading them as long as he keeps writing them!
This opens like a parody of the North London literary set as a group of people with (largely) over inflated opinions of their own worth gather for a dinner party where a new poem will be read aloud for the fiords and only time. Knowing that the framing narrative is set a hundred years in the future, on the other side of a rupture in society, this scene being set in 2019 and the poem being in the form of a corona (GEDDIT?) feels a bit like McEwan nudging us and shouting “Do you see what I did there? Do you?”. Allied with the general smugness of the dinner party, I wasn’t looking forward to the rest of this. But the book flips several times throughout its length, and it becomes something much better than these unpromising beginnings. Ultimately, it is about history, memory and truth - it’s hard not to see this as the 77 year-old McEwan grappling with the idea of his own legacy and how accurately posterity might treat him. In the end, it’s a compulsive and thought provoking book that keeps you turning the pages even as you pause to think about what you’ve just read.
Kit Burgoyne is Ned Beauman writing under a pseudonym, although no one seems to be making any secret of this, so I’m not 100% sure what the point is. The (excellent) NB books are at least genre adjacent, so a move into outright horror isn’t a complete swerve. This is schlockier than those, to be fair, but that’s also a big part of the enjoyment. And it is very enjoyable and fast moving enough that at no point do you stop and go “hang on…”, which is some achievement in a book that mixes revolutionary anti-capitalism with The Omen. It’s a hugely fun romp (as long as your definition of “fun romp” includes devil worship, mass death, and human sacrifice, which I’m afraid mine does), with a healthy political / satirical edge (guys, what if capitalism actually was the devil?). Makes me wish Dennis Wheatley had turned out to be a pen-name of George Orwell’s.
Michelle Paver’s previous ghost stores have relied on empty and barren landscapes to heighten the spookiness, but here she takes completely the opposite approach, opting for the maximalist sensory overload of a Central American rainforest. It’s a move that pays off, and the evocation of dripping humidity, tangled vegetation and ever-present life is probably the strongest thing here. Conversely the handling of the protagonist / narrator undermined the book a bit for me. He is not in any way a sympathetic or likeable character, which to her credit Paver does not shy away from, but this also meant that the final parts of the book where the horror builds to a climax feel more like watching a bad guy get his comeuppance than any kind of empathetic horror. Bluntly, I didn’t much care what happpened to him. It’s a very well written book, but somehow while it immerses you in it’s landscape it pushes you away from the narrative voice.
Pick your favourite word for non-realism to describe this, be it surreal, magical realist or just plain fantasy. Either way, Yagi uses the idea of talking in a dead language to delve into how we put up barriers against others and shut ourselves up. It’s a short book, but a very rich one, with plenty going on, and many threads to draw on and consider.
Also, I have a degree in Latin and I quail at the idea of speaking it conversationally so fair play to the narrator here.
We’re nine books in at this point, you’re not reading this to see if Slough House is for you, you just want to know if the latest one is any good. And of course it is. It might even be the funniest one yet, which is a big claim, but I laughed out loud several times reading this, and I’m usually super grumpy so there you go. There’s the usual twisty plot, where Jackson lamb and Diana Taverner are always a mile’s worth of steps ahead of the reader, and a climax that could well radically alter the future direction of the series, but the real pleasure is just spending time with this characters and this setting. Gold.
This is the story of two troubled young women spiralling round each other, bound by a small Irish town and the child who disappeared there twenty years ago. There’s the one who left, running wild and addicted to chaos, and the one who remained, turned inward and curdled. Neither of them are especially likeable, but by the end of the book we are at least approaching understanding. There’s a song I was reminded of when reading, with a lyric that goes “once you’ve touched the poison, you poison everything you touch”, which isn’t so far from the character work here. DeeDee and Caitlin are vividly drawn, and their interior lives are convincing. This characterisation is one of the key strengths of the novel. Part of me wishes we’d seen more of this with other character’s points of view bought in (there’s one character who maybe gets unfairly short shrift), but that would risk undermining the other pillar here, which is the intensity of the story. I tore through this, reading the whole thing in a day and a half, and that laser focus on the two leads is a big part of the reason. A very accomplished debut that deserves to do well.
Nick Harkaway’s second Titanium Noir expands on the first, and gives us more of a picture of this society and the tensions within it. Like all good SF, this book uses its central idea to interrogate our own world, in this case the rise of the billionaire class and their societal, cultural and political dominance. In case that sounds too heavy, the noir part of the series title is also fully in effect, with a succession of femme fatales, our hero getting banged on the head at regular intervals, and a crime that I gave up trying to solve or understand and just went along for a ride with. A lot of fun.
I’m very happy that Dead Ink are bringing Nathan Ballingrud’s stories into print on this side of the Atlantic. If the previous collection, North American Lake Monsters, concentrated mostly on, duh, monster stories, this one Is more explicitly supernatural, with all the stories tapping into an overarching mythology of Hell and the creatures that live there. It’s potent, fiercely imaginative stuff with vivd and intense imagery throughout. Ballingrud appears to have all the power and imagination of the early Clive Barker, and I am more than ready for whatever comes next.
Not actually a new novel, the indicia indicates that this was originally serialised back in 2013. Knowing that it’s easy to spot in the shape of the book, which feels like a novelisation of several D&D sessions (albeit ones put together by a DM with a fondness for the philosophical conundrum alongside the stealing and the stabbing and the setting things on fire). It’s a quick and simple read, with a lot of good gags and with enough going on under the surface to raise questions around personhood and free will. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good diversion for a few hours.
The storylines here don't really gel at all, it feels like two novellas awkwardly pushed together, a feeling only intensified by the cheap and easy way one of them is resolved. There are dangling characters and motivations, hints at setups that don't go anywhere....King's afterword suggests this one was a difficult experience for him, and sadly you can see that on the page. Even in his late period he can still write a good book (I really liked Billy Summers), but this isn't one of them. I wouldn't mind at all if Holly had a rest for a couple of books now.
It might be a bit niche, but there’s something about polyphonic novels set in a tight geographical location but ranging though time that I really like. I loved Alan Moore’s Voice of The Fire, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Barrowbeck and now Sarah Hall’s Helm. It’s a really good evocation of a place and the people who inhabit it over thousands of years, culminating in a glorious soaring sequence that will live long in the memory, all told in distinct voices and some excellent prose.
Wow. It’s been a long time coming, but this is Joe Hill’s best novel by a long way. It’s a beast of a book - I read an eARC, but I’d guess the print version isn’t going to be far short of a thousand pages - but nothing is bloated or wasted. It’s a genuine epic that spans decades and continents as the story of how a group of friends make a deal with something they really shouldn’t have plays out down the years. It feels lazy to make comparison with Hill’s dad (although to be fair he does kind of invite it with direct references to The Dead Zone and The Dark Tower here, let alone the first word of the title), but this is up there with any of King Sr’s biiiig books, and possibly even better. It has lots to say about class, about friendship, our emergent billionaire class, folklore and mythic archetypes and their relevance to the 21st century, plus there’s a bloody enormous dragon that loves nothing more than smashing up untold amounts of buildings and military hardware. It’s exciting, funny, tense and sad, and it’s the most fun I’ve had with a book for a long time.
This is the story of two British women over the next forty years or so, taking in climate change, eco-activism, rewilding and pandemics. It takes the form of pair of separate narratives that brush up against each other and overlap here and there as each chapter hops us forward a few years. Swift does a great job of keeping us up to date with these women’s personal lives and relationships over the decades while also sketching the political and social changes happening. She never flinches from the scale of the catastrophe facing us, but crucially offers hope and solutions instead of wallowing in doom. It’s tempting to read this as a smaller scale, more intimate, version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, but that isn’t necessary - it’s a more than good enough book to stand on its own. Plus it has some excellent dogs* in it. I really liked this one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for a UK edition of this one, and Dead Ink have finally obliged. It was worth the wait, an astonishing collection of stories. It doesn’t stint on the promise of monsters in the title, there are vampires, zombies werewolves and -yes!- a lake monster here, but it’s always the humans in the foreground. Not necessarily particularly likeable ones either, although you needn’t fear that this is some kind of trite ‘actually, MAN is the real monster’ exercise. Ballingrud manages to make us empathise with his cast of ex-cons, homeless people, harassed mothers, and lost children looking for fathers and belonging. It’s elegant, atmospheric and disturbing. What more do you want?
Horror on every level, from squirming gore to colossal historical injustice, with a good side helping of ambiguity - it would be easy to write this book with Good Stab as an avenging hero, but here he is a brutal monster. It’s just that pretty much everyone else is worse. Not always an easy read, but a very good one.
Perhaps deliberately for a book about AI, this all feels very uncanny valley. Something is off throughout, and the whole thing feels like a classic locked room detective story filtered through the scratchy eyeballs of someone who has been awake for far too long already. It’s a very well crafted trick, and good vibe for a futuristic story that is very much in conversation with it’s predecessors (there are several direct references to The Haunting Of Hill House, for instance) but it also highlights the chief flaw of this short novel - it feels consciously worked on, something that is too openly striving for an effect. Basically the bones are too visible and there isn’t enough flesh in the story to cover them. It’s still an intriguing set up, but it’s too cerebral and designed to ever become fully engaging.
A new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is always a treat, something to savour for the lyrical prose, the wise eye, and the compassionate characterisation. This one returns us to the world of Sarantium, albeit around a thousand years on from those books, around the time of the Hundred Years War, or it’s equivalent in the Kayverse (I just made that term up and I hate it already).
It’s a briefer book than some of his best, and I missed the opportunity to wallow in the world and the characters. The shorter length means you don’t get under the skin of anyone apart from the lead in quite the same way as you do his longer works, but it also fits the fancy that this is a recounting of something that actually happened long ago. It’s like the best history lecture you ever went to, and Kay is still probably our greatest living fantasy writer.
These books are a fantasy companion to Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, in that they relatively lowkey (although the stakes do get raised in this one) and the villains are largely kept offstage in favour of spending time with likeable characters who are -shock - nice to each other. These characters are mostly all wounded one way or another and the books have a melancholy air, but they don’t dwell on this darkness. Instead they focus on the importance of consolation and the bonds of friendship (even if Thara is terrible at recognising these latter). Ultimately they speak to what we can be instead of what we so often are, which is needed more than ever these days.
Contains spoilers
** spoiler alert ** The fifth Witches Of Woodville book. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already a fan, and just want to know if this one is any good. And I’m happy to report it is, with plenty of the same lovely and warm but also threatening and scary vibe that has run through the series. I do think there’s a limit to how long we can keep reading tales about Woodville being menaced by occult villains though, which is why I was particularly excited by the epilogue here, which suggests a new direction for the books. I for one am very much up for Faye Bright, SOE!